Time Frequency Slicing for Future Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting Networks

Time Frequency Slicing (TFS) is a novel transmission technique for the future of terrestrial broadcasting. TFS breaks with the traditional transmission of TV services over single RF channels. With TFS, services are distributed across several channels by frequency hopping and time-slicing. The bundling of several RF channels into a TFS multiplex provides important advantages. A capacity gain is obtained due to a more efficient statistical multiplexing of video content since more services can be encoded in parallel. Improved frequency diversity also provides a coverage gain since signal imbalances between RF channels can be smoothed. Enhanced robustness against static and time varying interferences can also be achieved. TFS was described, although not implemented, for DVB-T2 and was fully adopted in DVB-NGH. At present, it is proposed for a future evolution of DVB-T2 and will also be considered in the ongoing ATSC 3.0 standard. This paper investigates the potential advantages of TFS by means of field measurements as well as simulations and discusses practical implementation aspects and requirements regarding transmission and reception. Results demonstrate the interesting advantages of TFS to improve both coverage and spectral efficiency, which addresses the future necessity of a more efficient DTT spectrum usage.